Who is Tyler Stark?

On March 21, 2011, Tyler Stark, the weapons-system officer of an F-15 Strike Eagle, flew his first mission, as a part of Operation Odyssey Dawn, the U.N.-sanctioned bombing of Muammar Qaddafi’s forces, in Libya. After Stark and his pilot, Major Kenneth Harney, dropped their bomb, a weight imbalance caused them to go into a tailspin. It was nearly midnight when Stark ejected over the desert near Benghazi.

Parallel to Stark’s story, contributing editor Michael Lewis details how the president made the decision to intervene in Libya in his article for the October issue of Vanity Fair, “Obama’s Way.” He did so despite the objections of several Cabinet members—including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden—while managing a vitriolic Congress occupied with the debt-ceiling debate and monitoring a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, thought to be the hiding place of Osama bin Laden. In Libya, Operation Odyssey Dawn was the first major action taken by the administration in support of the populist uprisings of the Arab Spring, meant to prevent the likely massacre of 1.2 million people living in Benghazi. At the moment Stark and Harney dropped their 500-pound bomb, 27,000 of Qaddafi’s troops were crossing the desert in jeeps and tanks. They were expected in Benghazi any day. When Stark ejected, a tear in his parachute separated him from Major Harney, who was rescued by Marines later that night. In landing, Stark injured his knee and ankle, and found refuge under some bushes. When two vehicles pointed their searchlights at him and he was ordered to come out, he had to surrender.

“My first thought was how to find the guy,” Obama told Lewis. “My next thought was that this is a reminder that something can always go wrong. And there are consequences for things going wrong.”

Sixty years prior, during W.W. II, Stark’s grandfather, Melvin, had crashed behind enemy lines, and, that night, Stark was wearing his grandfather’s dog tags when the Libyan men put him in their truck. For an operation that had already drawn heat from Congressmen of both parties, Stark’s fate suddenly became integral to the shaping of public opinion.

He grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and was a freshman at Columbine High School, when the shooting occurred, in 1999. “He studied in the library every day at lunch hour,” says his father, Bruce. “Some of his friends were, like, ‘Come have lunch with [us].’ And he said, ‘Nah, I’ve got stuff to do.’ But they talked him into it. He was probably a lot more fortunate because if he were in the library—that’s where a lot of the killing was. So we’ve dodged a couple of bullets so far.”

Stark had known the story of his grandfather’s crash when he enrolled in the air-force R.O.T.C. program while attending Colorado State University. In 1941, Melvin Stark was over German-occupied Austria when his B-17 Bomber was shot down and he had to eject. Snagging a tree with his parachute, Melvin tied a tourniquet around his leg, which had been full of shrapnel, and fell in a creek after cutting himself loose. Two boys dragged Melvin from the water and then brought a Red Cross volunteer to treat his wounds. After several days, Melvin took a train south, to Graz. Found by the Germans, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp, where they issued him the dog tags that his grandson would later wear when he too had to rely on strangers to survive behind enemy lines. Some 40 years later, Melvin would search out the two boys and Red Cross volunteer who had helped him. Melvin’s son (Tyler’s father), Bruce, stays in touch with them to this day. While on leave from his base in Lakenheath, England, this summer, Tyler traveled to Austria with his parents. “Tyler was able to meet the lady that helped my father,” says Bruce. “She was very elderly, kind of on her deathbed, but her kids told her he was the grandson of the airman that went down.”

Before Melvin died, in 2005, he gave Tyler the commendations he had received, including the Purple Heart. “After Tyler’s ordeal, as we were talking to him and the air force was assuring us that he was okay, one of the lieutenant colonels said, ‘I noticed he had some interesting dog tags on,’” recalls Bruce. “Maybe that was part of his saving grace.”

Stark was able to make it out of Libya alive. It was no small feat; to keep him safe, Libyan rebels surrounded a hotel until an unidentified courier arrived to take him to the embassy. Before any of that could take place, however, Stark had to phone his base to tell him where he was. When he couldn’t remember the number, he called one that he could—his dad’s. To read more about Tyler Stark’s story, check out Michael Lewis’s October-issue story, “Obama’s Way.”